User blog:Helanhalvan/ Helanhalvan's Guide to making a Deck better
__NOEDITSECTION__ At the end of this post, I stressed that deck building is an iterative process, and therefore does require testing before it is "complete" if it ever happens. Deck tinkering is a creative process, and people probably work differently, keep that in mind while reading this. Also, this post contains some made up words, or at least names for concepts that might not have had names before. If you don't like them, and have better ideas, tell me. Terminology can make or break a lot of things. If you somehow have managed to assemble a deck, and want to improve it, there are a two ways to do so. * replacing a card/a few cards * re-building the deck At what stage "replacing a few cards" becomes "re-building the deck" is up for debate. However, where that line is drawn is not that important. There are a lot of cases, when replacing a card can trigger the reconstruction of a deck, therefore lets look at rebuilding decks first, and then look at why we might want to do that. For the typical evolution of a deck, it starts off with a deck, playing it, swapping some cards, playing it some more, swapping some more cards, and after a while realizing that doing a proper re-construction would be helpful. After that you're back with a new deck again. Re-building Decks Re-building a deck, in this article, is about changing some of the main concepts of it, basically changing one of the 3 main things you want figured out for a deck, as covered earlier. When doing this, it might be worth using the "duplicate" function in Duels, so you have both your old version and the new one to compare and contrast later. As we have 3 primary concerns when it comes to deckbuilding, and we can either add or remove something from each of them, we have 6 parameters to change: * Adding themes * Cutting themes * Adding colors * Cutting colors * More aggressive * Less aggressive In a "deck reconstruction", at least one, but often times more, of these things are changed. Adding Themes From my personal experience, it's rare that adding more themes to a deck after the first construction is a good idea, as I have a tendency to want to add all the things and later realize that there are only so many slots in a deck. However, sometimes a deck often gets into circumstances when some "themed" cards would be really nice. For example, in White there are quite a few good Human creatures, which means that adding some cards that only work with Humans might work out very well. There are also some decks that late-game activate Delirium or can use Madness cards very well. It also really depends on what counts as a theme. For example, does a deck that runs a lot of Werewolves, but no Werewolf synergy cards be considered a Werewolf deck? Even if it have no explicit synergy cards it plays blue to gain access to a lot of instants it can play instead of playing cards on its own turn to make the Werewolves flip. Cutting Themes Sometimes you start off with some great ideas, and then realize it's not really working well with your deck anymore. Most commonly it's that the parts to make the whole thing work that are not good on their own. When this happens, it might be a good idea to just remove the theme completely. The typical example is the Elves deck that remove more and more Elves for better creatures, and then the Elf synergy cards stop being worth running. Cutting colors At least for me, adding things to a deck is not really a problem. It's removing things, which is hard. One of the ways to try to resolve this, when dealing with a deck that has too many cards you want to play in it, is to see, if it would still work if one of the colors were removed. Removing a color does make your decks manabase better, which really makes your deck more powerful even if it contains less powerful cards. This means that cutting a color is usually a very good thing to do, if it does not make your deck that much worse. When it comes to deck improvements, this is one thing that can help a lot. One option might be to change one full color to a splash, just remember the rules for when splashing is a good idea from my previous post. Adding colors This one is also fairly rare, but sometimes you really miss one specific type of card, and the colors you run do not have those. One thing to keep in mind is that this is the reverse of cutting a color, adding one color makes your deck worse over all, so be careful that it might not be worth it. Adding a splash for some specific cards might be worth trying. Colors and theme changes So from all this, we can tell that if you have too many cards, you want to fit into a deck, removing a color is the first thing to look at. If that's not possible, see if removing a theme would make sense. If that does not work, my main recommendation is to remove one copy of some cards you have a lot of copies of in the deck and add one of each of the new cards. That way, you can later change the cards one by one, depending on how you like them. Keeping a deck to 60 cards is hard, but they're a must. In early stages of deck development, playing 63 cards, and then removing 3 cards you don't like, might be worth a try. Being more or less aggressive Changing a decks tempo plan can be really hard, especially in this meta. Exactly how fast you want your deck to be is a really hard call to make, and with all the clues and man-lands floating around in this meta, tempo becomes a less exact thing. There are a few things that might be worth thinking about though. First of all, is it possible for this deck to win early game? If that is not possible, you can safely add some sweepers and play defensive creatures. If it is, or you want it to be possible, playing sweepers and creatures with Defender will only make it hard for your deck to win at all, as you probably want to keep the aggression from the early-game up for the rest of the game. This is not the same as "is this an aggressive deck", as it might not be the main focus of the deck. For example, in a deck running the as a card advantage engine for the late game, and for the same reason, your deck still runs 8 one drops that can attack, so replacing cards like with more aggressive can give your deck the option to play very aggressively in the early game against some of the slower decks, while still being a control deck in other match-ups. The other question is what your late-game mana spending plan will look like. Do you want to play cards from your hand for all of your mana? Will you rely on mana sink abilities like ? How likely are you to get into those late-game situations and what tools does your deck have to deal with them? Even very aggressive decks can really use some man-lands for getting that extra creature when they run out of cards in hand. Again, this is not the same as "being a control deck". However, most control decks do run card draw effects to keep their hand relatively full for a large part of the game. This post covers this in more detail. Now when we know how to re-build our deck into a different but similar deck, lets look at how to replace one card with another card. =Replacing cards= The most obvious way of improving a deck is to add a card to it. I mean, that card is good, so adding it will make your deck better, right? Well, maybe. However, when you add a card to your deck, you also have to remove one, and removing cards can be hard. Is A better then B? First of all, it makes the over all card quality of your deck change—probably for the better. The main guideline there is for comparing two cards is, do I rather want A or B in what situations, and in which situations is it more important to have A instead of B. Another rule of thumb is that replacing cards with other cards that do close to the same thing is a good idea. When it comes to comparing creatures, you can do some approximations using a mental list of the value of certain card properties. The trick here is that a lot of effects do not have integer mana cost equivalents. For example, +1 attack or health is worth ~0.5 mana, flying is worth like ~0.8, trample ~1.2. For most people, busting out a calculator for comparing cards is not the way to go, and I do not recommend it, but looking at how much mana you would like to spend to upgrade from one creature to another can be a helpful tool. For removals, looking at what they can remove is helpful. For non-creature non-removals, it's more difficult, looking at what they generate and how fast compared to their mana cost is tricky, so testing is probably your best bet. After all this, it's really worth mentioning that A and B are fighting for a spot in a deck, depending on the deck one of them can be better or worse. There is also what happens to the deck when A replaces B. Will replacing A with B cause your deck to implode? This is mostly a problem if the cards involved are not really similar, aka have the same cost and forwards your game-plan in the same way, this change will also change your deck composition. If you're lucky, and/or know what you are doing, this can improve your deck's composition, or not change it at all. If you're unlucky, and/or not thinking of it at the time, it might cause imbalances to your deck. There are a few types of these: * Curve imbalances * Synergy imbalances * Creature/spell imbalances * Color imbalances With the change of just one card, these effects are quite small. However, when changing card after card without looking at the whole to much, you might get in trouble. Curve imbalances Curve imbalances is a quite sneaky thing that can also be very problematic. It's what happens if you replace too many cards from one cost to another. If you for example remove to many 2 drops and replace them with 3 drops you will end up having nothing on turn 2, play a 3 drop on turn 3 then a 3 drop on turn 4, which makes your deck way slower than if you got 2 drop on turn 2, 3 drop on turn 3, two 2 drops on turn 4. These kind of imbalances will make your deck behave strangely, but it will feel like bad luck a lot of the times. If your curve changes, it's an important thing to be aware of, as it might point you towards your deck transforming from having one tempo plan to another. Remember that this might not be a bad thing. Also, changing cards for other cards can be a useful way of fine tuning the curve of your deck. Synergy imbalances Synergy imbalances means that your decks synergies get affected in a strange way by the cards you're adding or removing. It depends largely on the themes you have in your deck, and might trigger you to remove some of them. The exile and return from exile Eldrazi cards are probably the ones you need to be the most careful with, as having to many or to few of either of those categories can affect your deck significantly. Creature/Spell imbalances Creature/spell imbalances is when you remove to many creatures from a deck, and then have issues with having only cards for helping your creatures in play, or the other way around. The solution is to realize that this is going on trying to add more creatures. To many creatures is rarely a problem, but might be problematic in match-ups where sweepers are a big issue. Color imbalances Color imbalances are the least problematic kind of imbalance. It basically means how many cards you have of each color changes. This is still worth looking at, as having very little of a color might trigger you to want to cut that color. This is the kind of imbalance that you have to care the least about, and only really matters if you want to change your mana-base (as in adding or removing colors, in the rebuilding section). =The End?= So this is how to make a deck better once you have one. Also I made a post about resource management, which covers more about how to spend mana, and regards a lot to the question about late-game mana spending. I might make more of these, and if you have suggestions, I'll look at them. This post where inspired by Crexlarth asking if I can cover how to select and replace cards in decks. If you have something you want covered, post a comment. If this makes no sense, post a comment. 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